NameplateSCT

Your damage numbers, on the nameplate they landed on.

NameplateSCT draws scrolling combat text out of the unit it actually happened to, instead of one pile of numbers in the middle of the screen. Big crits on the mob you are fighting, greyed-out numbers on the ones you are not, damage you take on your own plate — and an optional screen area for when you play without nameplates.

• 🎯 Anchored to the right plate — every number follows the unit it belongs to.
• 🕶️ Custom shadow — size, distance, angle, opacity and colour, per number.
• 🖥️ A real settings window — 1200×800, searchable, live counters, live preview, /nsct.
• 🔌 Profiles, filters, Masque, LibSharedMedia fonts — it fits into a normal addon setup.
• ✅ Works on Retail, Classic and Forever — including the restricted-client combat path.

✨ Highlights

🧩 Compatibility

On clients that hide the combat log, the addon automatically switches to UNIT_COMBAT and turns the damage amount into a secret value it never does maths on. A secret amount is passed straight to the font, so nothing is ever formatted, compared or cached in a way that would break.

📥 Install

CurseForge / Wago — press Install; updates arrive the usual way.

Manual

1. Download and unzip.
2. Copy the NameplateSCT folder into: World of Warcraft\_retail_\Interface\AddOns\ (or _classic_, _forever_, …)
3. Restart the client or type /reload.

The addon is enabled by default. If nothing appears, check AddOns on the character screen — a disabled addon draws nothing at all.

⚙️ First run

Type /nsct (or open Menu → Options → AddOns → NameplateSCT → Open dashboard).

The dashboard tells you what is happening right now:

• Events received — the addon is being fed combat events.
• Numbers drawn — numbers actually reached a plate.
• Combat source — UNIT_COMBAT or combat log, per client.

If events stay at 0 after a fight, the source is the problem, not your styling. If events climb but numbers stay at 0, look at Filters, the damage threshold and the size floor.

🖥️ The dashboard

Everything saves as you change it. Reset page restores one page; the profile reset on About asks for a second click, because it erases every setting in the profile.

The window opens at 1200 × 800 and scales itself down if your screen is smaller, so it never runs off the edge. The box in the title bar searches every setting: type shadow, and the shadow options appear as live controls on one page. Escape clears the search and returns you to where you were.

🩺 Diagnostics

The dashboard is a diagnostic tool, not just a settings page.

Seven automatic checks run continuously, each with a colour and a one-line fix:

• addon enabled
• event source subscribed
• enemy nameplates visible (skipped in screen mode)
• combat events arriving in the last 15 seconds
• numbers reaching the screen in the last 15 seconds
• Blizzard's own text not doubling up (read from the client's own combat-text frame, not from the addon's CVar write)
• no other addon drawing numbers (PlateSCT, ClassicFCT) — because "I turned it off and they still show" is usually a second addon

Counters track events received, numbers drawn, misses, duplicates collapsed, secret amounts, client refusals, and the active/pooled FontString count. Every early return in the combat path records why it dropped a hit — under the threshold, off-target text off, no nameplate for the unit, target-of-target, a switched-off category, healing off, animation disabled, filters — and the dashboard shows the last reason and how often it happened. "Events arrive but nothing is drawn" now has an answer instead of a guess.

🕶️ Text shadow

The client's own shadow is a fixed 1 px copy. NameplateSCT draws its own:

With the defaults the shadow is the same 1 px black shadow the addon always had — turning it on changes nothing visually until you move a slider. The shadow fades with the number because both are animated together.

🎨 Colours, fonts and icons

• School colours — physical, holy, fire, nature, frost, shadow, arcane and the combined schools, or one colour for everything.
• Normal and critical hits — a normal-hit colour and a crit colour, each with its own hex field and swatch. Crits work on every client: the reduced clients report the same CRITICAL flag Blizzard's own combat feedback reads.
• Misses — separate miss colours for other units and for you.
• Your own damage taken — its own colour and miss colour.
• Healing — a heal colour, an optional heal crit colour, and the heal animations.
• Fonts — every font LibSharedMedia provides; unknown names fall back to your client's default font, so CJK and Cyrillic clients look right.
• Icons — off by default; tick Show spell icons to put the spell icon next to the number, icons only, borderless, scaled, and skinned by Masque if it is installed.

📍 Where numbers about you are mounted

Numbers about you — damage you take and heals on you — can be mounted in either of two places:

• Screen area — the configured point from screen centre (the Incoming area).
• Your unit frame — they rise from your player frame, like the plate text does.

🚫 Filters

Two lists, one per line:

• Spells — spell IDs or names. Hide them, or allow only them.
• NPCs — NPC IDs. Hide them, or allow only them (handy for a boss-only setup).

Both lists are applied on every client; the dashboard's Filters page is the only place to edit them.

🎯 Off-target numbers

"Off-target" is literal: it means not the unit you currently have targeted — not "my target's target". The addon asks the client whether the hit unit is your target, and every unit that answers "no" is drawn in the off-target style (if the client cannot compare the units, the number is kept rather than hidden).

A hit that lands on a mob you are not targeting gets its own size, its own opacity, and one stratum lower so it never covers the target's numbers. You can

• give it a completely separate look (General → Use a separate off-target look),
• or switch it off entirely (General → Show text that is not on your target) and only ever see numbers from your current target,
• and damage you take is off by default (General → Show damage you take), including when the client reports it under an alias that points back at you.

The Appearance preview shows both styles side by side, so you can tune them without pulling a mob.

❓ FAQ

Nothing shows up at all

1. Is the addon enabled on the character-select screen?
2. Does the dashboard show events received climbing? If not, your client is not feeding combat events — check the combat source line.
3. Are enemy nameplates enabled? Nameplate mode needs them; screen mode does not.
4. Is Hide Blizzard's own numbers on? That only affects Blizzard's text, not yours.

<details> <summary>I see numbers twice</summary>

Blizzard draws its own nameplate damage text. Turn on Hide Blizzard's own numbers (Dashboard or General) so the two cannot double up.

On the modern clients (Forever, Midnight) damage and healing text has no per-category setting at all — the client only checks enableFloatingCombatText, and the addon turns that off and then stops the client's combat-text frame from receiving events, so the numbers stop in the current session rather than after a reload. The per-category switches (avoidance, block/absorb, DoTs) are turned off too for the classic clients, which do read them.

This client has no per-category switch below the master, so the toggle stops all of Blizzard's floating text: damage (pets included), healing, absorbs, misses, gains, auras and combat-state messages. That is what makes room for the addon's own numbers — including its healing, which has its own switch, colour and animation, so you do not lose heal text by hiding Blizzard's.

Turning the setting back off hands your previous values back, and so does turning the addon itself off. The dashboard check is green only when the client's own frame is actually unregistered — not because a CVar read "0". If it is still green and numbers remain, the No other addon drawing numbers check names the culprit.

Numbers are huge / tiny

Numbers → Font size sets the base size. The size modifiers (crits, misses, small hits) and the off-target size multiply it. Reset page on Numbers gets you back to the defaults.

My settings disappeared after switching profile

Settings live in the AceDB profile, so each profile has its own. About → Manage profiles switches, copies or resets them.

Why are some options greyed out?

Options that only the combat log can honour (crit colour, overkill, absorbed amounts, small-hit scaling, crit animations) are disabled on clients that hide the combat log, and say combat log only. Options whose parent switch is off grey out until it is on.

🧪 Quality

• 273 offline checks drive real events through the combat path: event source, secret values, de-duplication, misses, thresholds, off-target styling, the shadow, the preview, the settings audit and the window itself.
• Every setting is proved wired: each control declares the saved key it owns, and the suite checks that every key has a control, that each control writes exactly that key, and that the addon reads every key.
• No diagnostic suppressions: the addon is checked with wowlua_ls (WoW client types) and luacheck, both clean.

🗒️ Changelog

Every release, newest first, in CHANGELOG.md.

📜 License

MIT — see LICENSE. Bundled Source Sans 3 fonts are under the SIL Open Font License.

🙏 Credits

Originally by Justwait. Settings window, restricted-client support and the current maintenance by the NameplateSCT contributors. Thanks to the Ace3, LibSharedMedia and Masque authors, and to everyone who reported a bug with a real error log.